AIR Airbus SE

By Robert Wall 

HAMBURG, Germany--The challenges that accident investigators are facing locating crash recorders from EgyptAir Flight 804 almost two weeks after the plane went down is reinforcing efforts by Airbus to find alternative ways to tap crucial flight data from lost aircraft.

"This reinforces our overall approach to find solutions to get data out of accidents as soon as possible," said Charles Champion, Executive Vice President for engineering at Airbus Group SE's plane making unit.

EgyptAir Flight 804 crashed into the eastern Mediterranean with 66 passengers and crew on board on May 19. The plane was flying to Cairo from Paris.

Air-accident investigators have said the cause for the crash is still unknown adding urgency to find the so-called black boxes that typically provide the best clues about why a plane went down.

Investigators are in a race against time. The cockpit voice and flight data recorders are equipped with underwater beacons to help locate the storage devices, but the batteries on the beacons last only 30 days.

Airbus has been pursuing a dual-track approach for alternatives to the current problems, which have also hobbled other accidents including the 2009 crash of an Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it took about two years to recover the storage devices.

The search for alternatives was reinforced by the March 8, 2014, disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The main wreckage of the Boeing Co. 777 with 239 people onboard and its black boxes still haven't been found.

"It is really frustrating," Mr. Champion said.

One concept Airbus is working on is a system to monitor parameters during a flight. If there are indications problems are arising, then the plane would automatically transmit more information which could later help investigators reconstruct what occurred, Mr. Champion said.

The idea has made good progress, he said, with the biggest hurdle being affordable access to satellite bandwidth to handle such data.

Whether that concept would have aided the Flight 804 probe is unclear. It isn't certain the apparently sudden demise of the plane would have triggered the transmission of more data, Mr. Champion said.

The alternative would be for so-called deployable black boxes that would separate from the plane and float when it hits water, an idea which has met resistance.

Boeing Co., which has extensive experience using similar devices on military planes, has opposed expanding the concept to commercial aircraft partly on reliability grounds. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has resisted calls for mandating deployable recorders, particularly if they would supplement rather than replace conventional versions.

Airbus reckons that some objections to the technology, such as installing pyrotechnics on a plane to eject the devices and risk of mistaken deployment, are overblown, Mr. Cameron said.

EgyptAir investigators have said the information collected so far on Flight 804, including debris and body parts, haven't allowed them to draw conclusions over the cause of the crash.

The Airbus A320 plane sent a series of automated fault warnings just before all contact with the plane was lost. That data haven't been sufficient to isolate a likely cause for the crash.

Write to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 31, 2016 07:34 ET (11:34 GMT)

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